Not Waiting for Perot : He’s Due in Town This Week, but His Supporters Are Already in High Gear

Barbara Duffy, a 40ish woman who owns Seahorse, a sterling silver and vintage dress shop on the Venice boardwalk, stands outside her storefront with a “Ross Perot for President” button pinned to her blouse.

Perot posters with the same slogan hang in the windows, and a petition with scrawled signatures is posted on the ocean sidewall. Perot for President T-shirts and buttons are available for adonation. But, says Duffy sheepishly, most of the time “I just give them to people who want them.”

“I am a political neuter,” she says, conceding that she has not voted in the last two presidential elections and has not registered with a political party for the coming election. “He just seems so unpolitician. He is a businessman. A lot of the small-business people on the boardwalk are pro-Perot. He talks our language. And the other two are so bad . Even if Perot doesn’t win, he changed the two-party system. They can’t ever go back to the way it was.”

Duffy, a Santa Monica resident, is among 3,500 Westside Perotians who have volunteered in a grass-roots movement of circulating petitions to propel Perot onto the ballot.

The undeclared independent presidential candidate is scheduled to arrive for a visit in Los Angeles on Thursday, something that gives cause for palpable giddiness among Perotians.

Although the Perot Petition Committee for California has already garnered more than half a million signatures in the month since they started, which far exceeds the 134,781 required to qualify him for the ballot, committee spokesman Michael Ruppert says that supporters will continue to collect signatures to make a statement to Sacramento about Perot’s level of support.

West Los Angeles coordinator Dick Porter, 63, says that more than 50,000 of the signatures came at a rate of about 1,700 a day from petitioners working the traditionally liberal Westside. Jerry Brown, California’s native son, appears nearly forgotten. Perot is now the man Westsiders see as the alternative to two-party-politics-as-usual.

At West Los Angeles headquarters, located in a Beverly Hills office building on Robertson Boulevard, a swell of about 20 volunteers buzzes around an office equipped with four phones, a bulletin board with editorial cartoons of Perot, and the latest polling figures on Perot’s popularity in the state.

Perot’s address is posted along with the lyrics to “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and a note inviting supporters to write to him with slogan suggestions or other campaign ideas. The organization has too many volunteers now. Some callers are enraged because campaign coordinators have not returned their calls or because they had trouble locating the Perot camp.

Jeffrey Springer, 24, a Texas native who is a resident of West Los Angeles, just finished an interview for a position as a volunteer. “Working for Perot is pretty much heresy to my family because my dad is a Democratic delegate from Texas,” says Springer, who studied political science and economics at the University of Texas, Austin. “I grew up in Texas when Perot revamped education. The two-party system has divided government and undermined the economy. A Democratic Congress and a Republican president just blame the other party. With Perot they’ll be able to vote their conscience. I don’t think the presidency is much different than handling a major corporation.”

Another volunteer, Avery Krut, 32, sits at a nearby desk preparing for a meeting with volunteers and offers: “I abstained from voting in the ’88 election. People don’t talk politics here. That is not what is important. It is getting the economy back on track--regaining the ideas we all had in the past. It’s an issue of hope. Even if Perot turns out not to work, or win, it’s not over, because this groundswell of anger and distrust is bigger than Perot and has been mobilized into a political movement.”

One place where Perot’s popularity rose, then quickly waned, was West Hollywood. Kelly Elias, the West Hollywood petition coordinator, found a drastic drop in signatures by gays and lesbians after Perot said in an interview with the television program “20/20” that he would not hire a homosexual for a Cabinet position because the potential for controversy would detract from the person’s ability to do the job.

Elias, who wrote a letter to the editor of the West Hollywood Independent after the interview to “explain Perot’s statements,” said: “I had been there before and after the interview, and the reaction changed drastically. It went from people signing the petition to people walking by and saying, “Bigot.” Some people walk by and say, ‘He’s lost my vote,’ and these are people who have suffered prejudice before. But it’s fine now.”

Fine, however, is not the word David M. Smith, spokesman for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center, would use to describe the sentiment about Perot among gays and lesbians.

“The only question is, was it stupidity or hate” that explains Perot’s remarks, Smith said. “(Gays and lesbians) were signing before he made those remarks. They are not signing the petition right now because Perot indicated that he would not hire a gay or lesbian for a Cabinet position. He tried to backpedal. But I think his mentality comes from the ‘50s, where homosexuality is a dirty little secret.”

Perot’s political faux pas notwithstanding, Elias has managed to collect about 8,000 signatures from West Hollywood.

Indeed, Perot mania has penetrated even the far reaches, turning up in the most unlikely places.

Sitting in lifeguard tower No. 2 on Leo Carrillo State Beach, Kris Jeffrey, 23, seems an unlikely Perotian. He and a fellow lifeguard and pal compete in national lifeguard competitions concentrating on the dory competition, a race where a two-man team rows a small, flat-bottomed boat. Jeffrey’s life is nearly consumed with rowing workouts and patrolling the beaches--a kind of endless summer.

Jeffrey says of signing a Perot petition at the urging of a fellow lifeguard’s mother who heads up the Malibu operation: “I’ve never been into politics, and this is the first time I registered where I plan to vote. There are about five lifeguards who signed (Perot) petitions. One lifeguard has a Perot bumper sticker on his personal car. I work for the state, and I am for anything that keeps jobs in the nation. I am not real involved, but I’ve been watching Perot. From what I know of it, he’s my man for the vote.”